ANNE VON FREYBURG: IRONY AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE BETWEEN ORNAMENT AND IDENTITY

|by Maria Rosaria Roseo |

Anne von Freyburg, a Dutch artist born in 1979, initially trained as a fashion designer at ArtEZ in Arnhem, then completed a master’s degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University in London, where she currently lives and works. Her artistic practice is intentionally situated between applied arts and fine arts, aiming to dissolve their hierarchies. Textile art, often relegated to a minor expression, becomes for her a critical tool to investigate aesthetics, gender, and visual culture. Through a practice she herself defines as “textile painting,” she reinterprets Rococo works with fabrics, embroidery, and decorative materials, creating a visual language where Baroque beauty merges with pop irony and kitsch aesthetics.

From Fashion to Art

Her interest in textiles began in childhood. Raised in an artistic environment, she visited museums with her mother, who was active in the fashion sector. Together they attended international textile fairs such as the famous Première Vision in Paris, where she learned to recognize fabrics by touch. This sensory approach deeply influenced her aesthetics. Already during her fashion design studies, her creations took on a sculptural and installative character, more akin to art than prêt-à-porter fashion. After graduation, she participated in fashion shows and competitions, reflecting on how fashion could become an artistic language. Her references included designers like Viktor & Rolf and Rei Kawakubo, known for challenging the boundaries between garment, body, and concept.

From here, she moved to artistic photography, creating wearable sculptures documented through the lens. However, she felt the lack of direct contact with the material and began exploring embroidery as an artistic technique, overlaying it on photographic images. This experimentation paved the way for a broader reflection on the marginal role of textiles in the history of Western art. The belief that decorative materials are automatically associated with a lower aesthetic became the driving force of her practice.

Textile Painting and Deconstruction of Rococo

In 2014, she deepened her haute couture embroidery techniques at the École Lesage in Paris, where she learned the technical foundations of fashion embroidery. Although she found the teaching style traditional, she recognized the expressive potential of the medium. It was during her master’s at Goldsmiths, completed in 2016, that a turning point occurred: materials and concepts merged, establishing a strong link between ornament and cultural critique. Her research evolved toward a language in which ornament becomes a tool for aesthetic and ideological disruption.

Using fabrics to reconstruct past pictorial works, von Freyburg pays homage to painting but questions its historical authority. Rococo, often devalued for its aesthetic excess, becomes the core of her inquiry. The female artistic patronage of the time, such as Madame de Pompadour’s for Boucher, demonstrates how this style, associated with the graceful and the feminine, was unjustly marginalized. Rococo aesthetics today also permeate pop culture, from Disney films to digital memes.

Ornament and Social Critique

Von Freyburg draws a parallel between 18th-century court ladies and contemporary selfie culture, where the female body remains at the center of social gaze. The decorative excess of her works is both a response and a critique. She uses flashy and kitsch materials to overturn the rules of good taste, in an ambiguous play between seduction and denunciation. In this way, she also takes a stand against fast fashion and consumerism without giving up aesthetic pleasure. Ornament becomes a strategy to attract and destabilize.

Her work is also a reflection on the concept of female beauty as a social construct, often imposed, represented, and commodified. Von Freyburg exaggerates its codes in a theatricality she herself compares to a drag performance. The rich and layered surfaces of her works are fascinating and ironic, captivating but never neutral.

Installative Expansion and New Directions

In recent years, her practice has evolved toward wall installations. Von Freyburg has begun fragmenting her textile paintings into irregular, modular shapes, expanding the works beyond the limits of the frame. While initially working on Rococo portraits, she now explores more complex and larger compositions.

A new strand was born from her interest in 17th-century Dutch still lifes, particularly the floral bouquets of Jan van Huysum. In three recent works, she reflects on consumption, desire, and the exploitation dynamics hidden behind apparent beauty. Still lifes, considered minor subjects, were often among the few options accessible to women painters and become for the artist a key to reading mechanisms of aesthetic and social exclusion.

Progress of Love: Rewriting the Romantic Imaginary

Among her most recent works, a large wall installation was presented in the solo exhibition Filthy Cute at the Saatchi Gallery. The work reinterprets a scene from Fragonard’s Progress of Love series, one of the most famous pictorial narratives about Western love. Von Freyburg subverts the clichés of heteronormative romanticism, proposing a vision in which the heroine does not wait for salvation but is the autonomous protagonist of her own story.

Through monumental scale, saturated colors, and Baroque surface, she visually claims space for the feminine, the textile, and individuality. The work is an act of existence and freedom that questions dominant models of visual culture.

Currently, Anne von Freyburg is preparing a new solo exhibition at K Contemporary in Denver, USA. She is completing the full series inspired by Progress of Love, of which two works have already been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery. The original cycle, commissioned by Madame du Barry for her private pavilion, is linked to a story of exclusion: Du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, was replaced and banished from court.

This story pushed the artist to question how deeply romantic clichés are rooted in visual culture and continue to influence social expectations. Her works celebrate self-love, breaking imposed roles and offering new narrative possibilities.

In Sunny Side Up, for example, she included pop elements like My Little Pony and Hello Kitty, juxtaposing pastel colors with details like the sign “I want you” and hearts with romantic inscriptions. An apparently childish aesthetic that hides a reflection on identity in transformation and the symbolic ambiguity of images.

Anne von Freyburg’s practice intertwines aesthetics and politics, irony and depth. By rereading art history through textiles, she contributes to renewing the visual language and opening spaces for reflection on gender, representation, and power. The Denver exhibition represents a new stage in a coherent path that balances critique and visual seduction.